Magma interview for Celestial Mass

Prog rock pioneers Magma are preparing to play at the Barbican.

Music of tyhe apocalypse: Magma

By Peter Culshaw

11:11AM BST 01 Oct 2009

Progressive rock, for decades pop’s least fashionable genre, is enjoying a rehabilitation. Earlier this year the BBC series Prog Britannia looked at the genre through sympathetic eyes, and many of 2009’s hippest bands have a strong prog sound, from the US’s Animal Collective to chart-topping Muse.

Pioneers of the genre who thoroughly deserve to be revisited, and who play the Barbican next Tuesday, are the French band Magma. Big in the Seventies, the band have retained an obsessive following with unlikely fans, such as snooker player Steve Davis – who even paid for them to perform here once – and the Sex Pistols’ John Lydon.

Magma mainman Christian Vander has often been described as the best drummer in the world. Vander’s compositions might sound about as prog as you can get — concept albums with tricky time signatures about spiritual struggle and purification and the colonisation of space – but he is a true original.

Now 61, Vander is modest in demeanour and softly spoken, but he can be as intense as his music. His latest artistic direction involved the creation of an entirely new language, Kobaïan, which provides the lyrics for most of his music. Vander explains that this rather guttural language has two versions – courtly and colloquial: “French wasn’t expressive enough for the sound of the music I had in my head.” Although born in France, it’s not entirely surprising that his family were German and Polish. His music, with its towering Wagnerian visions, is not in the least bit French.

While he has been producing albums prolifically, either under the Magma label or as the jazzier Offering, there remain numerous, often grandiose projects he hopes to realise, particularly for orchestra, for which he says he needs “a mad king of Bavaria” benefactor. Certainly his tonal, apocalyptic music is out-of-step with the French avant-garde establishment. But he has faith that “if you never compromise in your art, eventually the fates are kind to you”.

He has already written what will be his last piece – The Story of Zero. “I wrote it in 1977, and haven’t recorded it. When I do, it will be the last thing I do. Nothing will come after Zero.”

'Celestial Mass’ with Magma is at the Barbican, London EC2 (020 7638 8891), next Tues.